Senior Programme Manager — JPEG Observatory

Senior Programme Manager — JPEG Observatory

1. Position

Job Title: Senior Programme Manager — JPEG Observatory
Team / Vertical: Solutions — Economics and Growth
Reporting To: Lead, Solutions
Works closely with: Scientific Director; Economics and Statistics Unit (ESU); State Delivery Teams; External partners (Governments and other ecosystem partners)
Location: Chennai or Delhi (preferred), with substantial travel to partner state locations
Experience: 10–15 years, with meaningful experience at the research-policy interface and demonstrated ability to engage senior government officials

2. About CEGIS

Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS — pronounced See-Jis) aims to improve lives by helping Indian state governments deliver better development outcomes. We believe that the most impactful lever for accelerating national development is to improve governance and state capacity to better deliver core public services at scale.

Informed by cutting-edge research and evidence as well as a practical orientation toward implementable ideas, CEGIS works with state governments in India to enable a transformative improvement in their functioning. CEGIS's vision and Theory of Change are an outcome of extensive research done by Prof. Karthik Muralidharan (CEGIS Co-Founder and Scientific Director) and outlined in his multiple award-winning, national bestselling book Accelerating India's Development, and enabled by strategic philanthropic support provided by Ashish Dhawan (CEGIS Co-Founder).

CEGIS is organised into solutions teams that lead the design and technical quality of our evidence-backed approaches; delivery teams that lead state-facing work to contextualise and implement solutions; and enablement teams that support the organisation's functioning. Since its incorporation in 2019, CEGIS has grown to 150+ members working across nine Indian states, and is on a strong growth trajectory.

3. About the JPEG Observatory Initiative

Indian state governments make consequential decisions on growth, investment, and jobs without an integrated view of the factor markets — land, labour, capital, utilities, and rule of law — that determine economic outcomes. National datasets provide reliable state-level aggregates, but become thin or absent at the district and sub-district level where most economic policy decisions are actually made. And the data that would make factor markets legible at this granularity already exists — in state registration records, GST filings, EPFO data, treasury systems, satellite imagery, and scheme databases — but sits in administrative silos that were never designed for analytical use, and that no existing institution is positioned to integrate.

The JPEG Observatory (Jobs, Productivity and Economic Growth) is CEGIS's response to this gap. It is a state-anchored intelligence system designed to make factor markets and growth outcomes legible to Chief Ministers and Chief Secretaries at sub-state granularity, on a continuous cadence. The Observatory is not an academic research instrument — its unit of success is whether a state policymaker, presented with its outputs, can make a better decision than they would have made without it. It is not a dashboard project — it is an embedded analytical function that combines continuity, decision-relevance, and institutional memory in a way that no existing instrument provides.

The Observatory is built around five factor-market modules (Land, Labour, Capital, Utilities, Rule of Law) and three outcome layers (Growth, Productivity, Distribution), designed to be deployed modularly as state-specific MVPs rather than as a single fully-developed system. The JPEG Observatory represents a new frontier in CEGIS's work — expanding from the governance and human-capital reform that has been its core offering to the economic growth and factor-market intelligence agenda. The SPM hired for this role will be at the center of building this initiative from the ground up.

4. Position Summary

The Senior Programme Manager will lead the end-to-end development of the JPEG Observatory — from conceptual and analytical underpinning to state-level deployment, stakeholder buy-in, and institutional partnership.

Working closely with the Scientific Director, the Lead Solutions, and the Economics and Statistics Unit, the SPM will own both the intellectual architecture of the Observatory and its practical delivery: shaping the analytical framework in collaboration with economists and domain experts, building institutional support at State governments and GoI entities, managing the KKRDB engagement as the first live deployment, and overseeing the technical partnerships and other external collaborators.

The role requires an unusual combination of economic and statistical depth — applied to policy-actionable insights rather than academic research outputs — with the stakeholder credibility to hold conversations at Chief Secretary level and the programme management discipline to drive complex, multi-stakeholder work to time-bound outcomes.

Given the early-stage nature of the initiative, the SPM will be substantially hands-on in implementation for the first eighteen to twenty-four months, while simultaneously building the team and institutional infrastructure for the Observatory's longer-term scale.

5. Roles & Responsibilities

5.1 Analytical Framework Development

• Own the JPEG Observatory's indicator framework — the set of factor-market and outcome indicators, their data sources, aggregation protocols, and the analytical logic connecting them to policy-relevant questions — in collaboration with the Economics and Statistics Unit and external domain experts.
• Drive the design and periodic refinement of the Observatory's measurement methodology, ensuring that analytical outputs are defensible to a technically competent audience while remaining decision-relevant to non-specialist policymakers.
• Lead structured engagements with economists, statisticians, and domain specialists — within CEGIS and externally — to validate indicator choices, interrogate data-source assumptions, and incorporate new evidence on Indian factor markets.
• Develop the analytical architecture for cross-factor intelligence: identifying where factor markets interact, where they jointly constrain growth, and what becomes analytically possible when data from multiple sources is integrated — work that no single line department or vertical organisation currently produces.
• Maintain a clear and enforced distinction between what the Observatory can claim at each stage — descriptive monitoring versus diagnostic analysis versus causal inference — and build this epistemological discipline into all analytical products and communications.

5.2 State Engagement and Deployment

• Lead the first State engagement as the Observatory's first live deployment: managing the Phase 0 analytical workstream (regional economic atlas, infrastructure-growth analysis, firm survey instrument design), coordinating with key stakeholders, and delivering outputs that are useful to live asset-allocation and policy decisions.
• Build and manage the state-government relationships required for data access, analytical buy-in, and policy uptake: identifying the right institutional anchors within each state partner, designing the data-sharing architecture, and managing the transition from analytical output to policy conversation.
• Identify and sequence subsequent state engagements, developing state-specific entry points (land observatory, firm survey, sub-state growth atlas) based on each state's priorities and data readiness, and managing the Observatory's portfolio of state relationships as it grows.
• Ensure that each state deployment contributes to a shared cross-state data architecture — common geographic spine, standard indicator definitions, consistent data-layer conventions — so that the Observatory's analytical capacity compounds across engagements rather than being rebuilt from scratch each time.

5.3 GoI and Institutional Stakeholder Engagement

• Drive the JPEG Observatory's engagement with key central government entities: building the analytical case for cross-ministry administrative data integration, identifying use cases of most relevance to each institution, and navigating the governance and protocol conversations required for sustained data access.
• Represent the Observatory in senior-level government conversations, with the credibility to hold substantive analytical discussions with secretaries, principal secretaries, and equivalent senior officials, and to translate between the Observatory's technical content and the decision-making context of the government audience.
• Build and manage the relationship with Chennai Mathematical Institute on the data-engineering and dashboard partnership: specifying the analytical requirements, overseeing the ETL pipeline and dashboard development, ensuring the technical architecture supports continuous data refresh and multi-state scalability, and maintaining the clean separation between the engineering function (CMI) and the analytical and methodological function (CEGIS/ESU).
• Identify and manage relationships with academic and research institutions that can provide external methodological review for the Observatory's analytical outputs, ensuring the quality-assurance function has an institutional home independent of both CEGIS and the engineering partner.

5.4 Knowledge Products and Communication

• Lead the production of the Observatory's external knowledge products — concept notes, indicator frameworks, state deployment reports, analytical outputs, donor-facing documents — maintaining the analytical register and intellectual rigour that establishes the Observatory's credibility with both government and expert audiences.
• Develop and maintain the Observatory's internal knowledge architecture: the cross-state data schema, the indicator dictionary, the data-layer conventions, and the methodological documentation that allows the analytical team to work consistently across state engagements.
• Communicate the Observatory's findings to policymaker audiences in formats that are decision-relevant — translating from analytical outputs to specific policy implications, asset-allocation inputs, and reform priorities — without over-claiming on what the data supports.
• Build the JPEG Observatory's profile with national and international development organisations, funders, and policy networks, including through publications, conference presentations, and strategic outreach, where these contribute to the Observatory's analytical credibility and resource base.

5.5 Team and Programme Management

• Build and manage the JPEG Observatory's core team over time, including recruiting and developing junior analytical staff, coordinating the ESU's analytical bandwidth allocation to Observatory workstreams, and managing the interfaces between the Observatory's solution-team functions and the state delivery teams that operationalise its outputs.
• Manage the Observatory's programme portfolio — maintaining a clear workplan across the State engagements, GoI conversations, partner relationships, and conceptual development workstreams — with discipline on timelines, outputs, and resource use.
• Proactively identify and manage programme risks: data-access dependencies, analytical over-reach, stakeholder engagement gaps, capacity constraints, and the risk of dashboard-first demand crowding out analytical-depth work.
• Provide regular, high-quality updates to the Lead Solutions and Scientific Director on programme progress, analytical developments, and strategic decisions that require senior leadership input.

6. Education & Experience

Education

A strong foundation in economics, statistics, public policy, or a closely related quantitative discipline is required. A master's degree or doctoral qualification is preferred, though equivalent demonstrated analytical capability will be considered.

Experience — Required

10–15 years of substantive work at the research-policy interface, with demonstrated ability to generate analytical insights that have influenced or directly informed policy decisions.

Experience engaging senior government officials — Principal Secretary level and above — with the ability to lead analytical conversations in high-stakes institutional settings.

Demonstrated competence with Indian administrative data and statistical systems: familiarity with sources such as PLFS, NFHS, NSS, GSTN, EPFO, RBI BSR, CMIE, and state administrative databases, and understanding of their granularity, quality, and appropriate analytical use.

Track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder programmes to time-bound outcomes, with ownership over both the analytical content and the programme management.

Experience producing policy-relevant knowledge products — analytical reports, concept notes, briefs — that are read and used by government counterparts, not merely reviewed by academic peers.

Experience — Preferred

Prior work on Indian economic growth, factor markets (land, labour, credit, infrastructure), or state-level economic governance.

Experience with spatial or sub-national data analysis, including familiarity with geographic information systems, satellite-derived indicators, or administrative data aggregation at district and sub-district level.

Exposure to the Indian government's digital public infrastructure — GSTN, EPFO, API Setu, PFMS, or similar central and state administrative systems.

Experience commissioning or managing large-scale firm or household surveys, including sampling design, questionnaire development, and fieldwork quality assurance.

Prior work in a research or policy organisation with a government-partnership model (think tanks, development finance institutions, government advisory units, or similar).

7. Required Competencies

a) Domain Competencies

Applied economics and statistical depth — actionability focused. Strong foundation in development economics, applied econometrics, or quantitative policy analysis, with the ability to evaluate and produce rigorous analytical work. Critically, this depth must be oriented toward what policymakers can learn and do, not toward academic publication. The SPM should be equally comfortable interrogating an identification strategy and interrogating whether a finding is operationally useful to a Chief Secretary.

Factor-market and growth intelligence. Substantive understanding of the Indian economic landscape — how factor markets function, where they are distorted, what the literature says about binding constraints to growth at sub-national level — sufficient to lead the Observatory's analytical agenda and assess the quality of analytical outputs.

Government data systems and statistical infrastructure. Practical familiarity with Indian administrative and statistical data sources — their institutional origins, coverage, granularity, and quality limitations — at a level that supports honest and informed data-layer decisions.

Policy and governance understanding. Understanding of how state governments function: the relevant institutional structures (Finance Department, Planning Commission, line departments, regional development bodies), how decisions are made, and where analytical intelligence can and cannot change behaviour.

b) Functional Competencies

Translating analysis into actionable intelligence. The ability to move between analytical rigour and decision-relevant communication — knowing when to flag methodological limitations and when to lead with the policy implication — is the SPM's most important functional skill. Academic-quality research and policy-useful research are not the same; the SPM must be fluent in both registers and clear about which context calls for which.

Multi-source data integration and interpretation. Ability to integrate data from multiple administrative and survey sources, understand the quality and comparability constraints across them, and produce defensible analytical synthesis.

Senior stakeholder engagement and communication. Ability to lead substantive conversations with Chief Secretaries, Secretaries, and equivalent senior officials — not just present to them — with the credibility to push back on politically convenient but analytically weak interpretations, and the sensitivity to do so constructively.

Complex programme management. Demonstrated ability to manage multi-workstream, multi-stakeholder programmes with discipline: maintaining clarity on outputs, sequencing dependencies, managing resource constraints, and escalating decisions appropriately.

Written communication and knowledge-product quality. Ability to produce rigorous, well-structured analytical documents — concept notes, indicator frameworks, policy briefs, state reports — to a standard that establishes institutional credibility with both government and expert audiences.

c) Behavioural Competencies

Intellectual ownership. The JPEG Observatory is a new initiative with significant conceptual and operational development still ahead. The SPM must take genuine ownership over the intellectual direction of the work, not just manage a defined programme. This requires the confidence to take analytical positions, the humility to revise them when challenged, and the discipline to hold a long-term architectural vision while being tactical about near-term opportunities.

Comfort with honesty under pressure. The Observatory's credibility rests on not over-claiming what the data supports. The SPM must be able to maintain analytical honesty — about data limitations, methodological constraints, and what the Observatory can and cannot tell a policymaker — even when the institutional pressure is toward more confident-sounding outputs.

Collaborative leadership. The SPM works across a complex internal and external network — ESU, state delivery teams, CMI, state governments, GoI entities, academic reviewers — without direct authority over most of these relationships. The ability to lead through intellectual credibility, clear communication, and consistent follow-through is essential.

Learning agility in a new domain. The JPEG Observatory sits at the intersection of development economics, data infrastructure, state governance, and applied policy research. No single background provides complete preparation. The SPM must be a fast, structured learner who can develop genuine competence in unfamiliar areas — data engineering constraints, DISCOM regulatory filings, GoI data-governance frameworks — as the work demands.

Effectiveness in ambiguity. The initiative is at an early stage on multiple fronts simultaneously — conceptual, institutional, operational, and financial. The SPM must be able to make progress on multiple workstreams under conditions of genuine uncertainty, without either paralysing on unresolved questions or prematurely closing analytical or institutional options.

8. Role Logistics

Base Location: Chennai or Delhi preferred. The role involves travel to partner state locations, New Delhi for GoI engagements, and other CEGIS offices as required.

Language: Fluency in English required. Proficiency in Hindi and at least one of Tamil/Kannada would be preferred.

Travel: Substantial, particularly in the first two years of the engagement. As additional state engagements are developed, travel patterns will expand accordingly.

9. Pre-reads for the Application Process

Please review the following materials before sending in your application.

CEGIS Overview:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e9IfrfXkucbgZcZp51X0rAUp_DFAbSj8/view

A glimpse into life at CEGIS — CEGIS Retreat 2024:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqo8dA6LGs8

State Capacity, Governance, and Public Systems — Prof. Karthik Muralidharan on Seen & Unseen with Amit Varma: on education, healthcare, federalism and state capacity, and bureaucracy in India.

Prof. Karthik Muralidharan's book Accelerating India's Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance — especially Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 11.

Recommended listening:

Karthik Muralidharan Episodes on SparX by Mukesh Bansal: Podcast Episodes 1, 2, and 3.

Karthik Muralidharan: India's Roadmap for Effective Governance — FED Dialogues.

Karthik Muralidharan on Making Governance More Effective — Sushasan Podcast.